Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  His strongest glow came from the expectation and the exhortation in thinking and saying “it is nearly all ‘back’ now, thank God!” Unexpectedly, he had a smaller body of water to cross before the larger one. A sudden spring thaw had flooded three hundred miles of towns, valleys, and railway track between Rochester, Utica, and Albany, “drowned farms, barns adrift like Noah’s arks, deserted villages, broken bridges.” The railway officials, making an intense effort to get the famous visitor through, inched the train toward Albany. The workmen, coming across a large train into which cattle and sheep had been locked, freed the animals, which, “in their imprisonment,” had begun “to eat each other.” Their flesh was torn, their faces haggard.29

  As the April departure date came closer, Dickens felt tired and acutely homesick. He felt “depressed all the time (except when reading)” and had lost his appetite. On reading days, at seven in the morning he had fresh cream and two tablespoons of rum, at noon a sherry cobbler and a biscuit, and at three a pint of champagne. Five minutes before his performance he had an egg beaten into a glass of sherry, during the intermission strong beef tea, and afterward soup, altogether not “more than half a pound of solid food in the whole four-and-twenty hours.” Dolby hovered over him, “as tender as a woman and as watchful as a doctor.” He took laudanum to help himself sleep. In Boston, for his farewell readings at the beginning of April, he looked pale and exhausted, worried that the catarrh might have done him some “lasting injury in the lungs.” The Fieldses joined Norton and Longfellow “in trying to dissuade him from future Readings.… He does not recover his vitality after the effort… and his spirits are naturally somewhat depressed by the use of soporifics,” which had become “a necessity.”

  Dickens felt further depressed by the news of the Reverend Chauncey Hare Townshend’s death, and by the grim, ludicrously comic realization that soon after he returned to England he would have to write and edit a new Christmas number of All the Year Round, as if he “had murdered a Christmas number years ago … and its ghost perpetually haunted me.” He was right, in the sense that he had long ago turned Christmas into a commercial imperative, and his reading tour was the logical extension of that transformation of the spirit into money. Procter remarked that Dickens must be tired of “Yankee applause,” for “what is any applause worth, except from our friends.” Actually, a large number of his English colleagues had a very firm sense of the value of Yankee applause. His determination to meet his material goals was an instance of his particular personality expressing a general sense among English writers that it would be foolish not to profit from the American market.30

  Now that the end was near, Dickens could admit that he felt “nearly used up. Climate, distance, catarrh, travelling, and hard work, have begun … to tell heavily upon me. Sleeplessness besets me; and if I had engaged to go on into May, I think I must have broken down.” The excuse of the impeachment proceedings at the beginning of April came just in time. Only the Boston and New York farewell readings remained. Though he feared that the political climate would “damage the farewells by about one half,” they had no effect on the size of his audiences. In the usual pattern, each afternoon at four he felt as if it would be impossible to read that night. But when he walked onto the platform, his spirits rose, his energy spiraled, his voice returned. Afterward, he collapsed. Fordyce Barker prescribed a tonic that seemed to help. Dickens assured Wills that he was “very weary, but no worse.” When he went onto the platform on April 8 for his final Boston reading, he found his table covered with flowers. He thanked “the great public heart” and “the private friendships that have for years upon years made Boston a memorable spot to me.” The receipts for this one reading, the largest for any single reading in America, amounted to $3,456 (about £494).

  After the performance he spoke briefly, tears trembling in his eyes, his voice quavering. He had “never until this moment really felt” that he was “going away. In this brief life of ours it is sad to do almost anything for the last time.… It is a sad consideration with me that in a very few moments from this time, this brilliant hall and all that it contains, will fade from my view—for evermore.” As he wished them farewell, the audience rose, shouting, cheering, waving hats and handkerchiefs.31 With his last flicker of energy, beginning on the thirteenth he gave his New York farewell readings. Since he found it almost impossible to walk, he had to make a major effort to get to the platform. A severe attack of erysipelas now threatened his attendance at a banquet in his honor on the eighteenth at Delmonico’s. He might have to cancel his final reading on the twentieth.

  Dolby, meanwhile, tussled with an ambitious federal tax commissioner, who refused to accept the ruling from his Washington superiors that Dickens’ earnings were exempt from the 5 percent income tax. Since the stakes were high, Dolby played a cat-and-mouse game of bluff and appeal to higher authority. Dolby’s own commission was £2,888. Ticknor and Fields received a £1,000 fee and 5 percent of the receipts of the Boston readings. The expenses in America had been $39,000 (about £5,570), the preliminary expenses £614. Dickens’ profit, after all costs and commissions, was about $140,000 or £20,000. The tax commissioner threatened to prevent their leaving the country. In the past two years, Dickens had earned from his readings alone approximately £33,000—£20,000 from the American readings and £13,000 from the tours for the Chappells, the equivalent of at least £1 million or $1.5 million to $2 million today. Neither Dolby nor Dickens wanted to give up a penny of it.

  The two hundred gentlemen who assembled for the banquet at Delmonico’s, hosted, ironically, by the New York press, which had reviled him in 1842, became restless when the guest of honor did not appear. Finally, an hour late, Dickens arrived. Since he had found it impossible to get a boot on his swollen, heavily bandaged foot, he had had to drag himself to the restaurant. Dolby had spent half the day finding a gout bandage with which to cover it. Leaning on Horace Greeley’s arm, he was conducted to the platform amid cheers while the band played “God Save the Queen.” In response to Greeley’s toast, which nostalgically evoked the day over thirty years before when he had published in his new magazine a story by an unknown writer known as Boz, Dickens warmly, appreciatively recalled his days as a young reporter, “always steadily proud of that ladder” by which he had risen.

  In his best oratorical style, he thanked America and Americans, praised their “national generosity and magnanimity,” verbally embraced his American friends, and emphasized that, despite any differences that had and that might arise, America and England were bound together by their commitment to justice. The amazing changes that he had seen were all for the better. “Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant as to suppose that in five-and-twenty years there have been no changes in me, and that I have nothing to learn, and that I had nothing to learn and no extreme impressions to correct from when I was here first.” He was sincere in more than acknowledging that “I have been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration, and … respect for … privacy.… This testimony … I shall cause to be republished, as an appendix to every copy of those two books of mine in which I have referred to America.” To laughter and applause he repeated the pledge he had made that he had no intention of and absolutely would not write another book set in or about America. “The fact is exactly the reverse, or I could not have spoken,” he later told an acquaintance, “without some appearance of having a purpose to serve.”32 This testimony was his final statement on the republic of his imagination.

  They were almost his last public words in America. He did not think he would be able to read on the twentieth. The evening before, though, he persuaded himself that he could do it one last time. Dr. Barker composed a statement to distribute to the audience medically certifying that “Mr. Dickens is suffering from neuralgic affection of the right foot.… But I believe that he can read to-night without much pain or inconvenience (his mind being set on not disappointing his audience), with the aid of a slight addition to hi
s usual arrangement,” a rest stool and partial seat to relieve some of the pressure. Making a public concession to his health for the first time, he wanted his audience to be neither unprepared nor disappointed. He told the surprised Dolby, from whom he had concealed the extent of his pain, that he was so exhausted that he could experience nothing but his own exhaustion and that “if I had to read twice more, instead of once, I couldn’t do it.” He ended, as he had begun, with A Christmas Carol and the trial scene from Pickwick, and with a brief speech that had some of the feeling but none of the passion of his Boston farewell. He wanted nothing more than to be aboard the Russia, to have the ocean wind sharply in his face, to feel himself steaming homeward.

  On April 23, he and Dolby nervously boarded the ship. The federal tax collector had pledged to have them removed. New York police officers, though, provided by the sympathetic chief of police, physically protected them from arrest by the tax agents who had come aboard. At the same time, the Cunard people were hosting an elaborate farewell lunch on the ship. Just before sailing, Anthony Trollope came alongside in the mail tender “to shake hands.” Seeking his own American fortune, he had arrived the day before. Fellow members of the Athenaeum, they had an understood but unexpressed family connection through Fanny Ternan’s marriage to Thomas Trollope. Amazed to see him, Dickens euphorically thought him “the heartiest and best of fellows … a perfect cordial to me, whenever and wherever I see him.” All those who were going ashore soon descended to the mail ship and other small boats, except Fields, who lingered for one last moment between them. For a few seconds the friends embraced. “You will never know how I loved you both; or what you have been to me in America, and will always be to me … or how fervently I thank you.” As the evening fell rapidly, steamboats, police tenders, and private tugs followed the “magnificent ship” for some distance down the bay, extending their final salutes by fading whistles and distant cannons.33

  IN EARLY MAY 1868 THE CONQUERING HERO STEPPED OFF THE GRAVE- send train into the carriage that was waiting to take him to Gad’s Hill Place. He drove between houses dressed with flags of welcome and on a road crowded with farmers who had come out in “their market-chaises to say, ‘Welcome home, sir!” Lavishly decorated with banners and flags, Gad’s Hill had hardly a brick visible. Driving up, he was overwhelmed by the cheerful brightness and the happy open arms of his family. A few days later, on Sunday, at St. Mary’s, he could not prevent the bellringers dashing out at the end of the sermon and ringing “like mad” to celebrate his return. Deeply relieved to be home, where various “birds sing all day, and the nightingales all night,” from his chalet, high up among the branches of the trees, he watched “the birds and the butterflies fly in and out, and the green branches shoot in, at the open windows, and the lights and shadows of the clouds come and go.…”34 Kent was in its springtime beauty. London and American shadows seemed far away.

  When he had stepped off the ship at Liverpool, he had surprised those who feared that the returning millionaire would look deathly. After three days at sea, he had begun to feel revitalized. On some of the fine days he walked and sat in the sun. When a delegation of passengers had asked him to give a reading, he politely replied that sooner than do it he “would assault the captain, and be put in irons.” Arriving home with a suntan that had bronzed his ruddy cheeks into a glow, he boasted that he was in his “usual brilliant condition.… Katie, Mary, and Georgina expected a wreck, and were, at first, much mortified.” His belief in his recuperative powers took on comically grandiose proportions. “My doctor was quite broken down in spirits when he saw me, for the first time, since my return.… ‘Good Lord!’ he said, recoiling, ‘seven years younger!’” His friends were heartened, and he took special pleasure in disappointing expectations, as if the great magician were an artist of self-healing as well as of literary fictions.

  He returned, though, to a heavy All the Year Round workload, forced on him by Wills’s riding accident. Morley took up some of the slack, and Wilkie Collins lent a hand. When it became clear that Wills would not be returning, Charley’s request that he be given the chance to turn his “liberal education to account” as a staff member began to seem sensible. His business venture having failed, he had filed for bankruptcy, some of the costs of which his father paid. For someone who felt that he could not get his “hat on” because “of the extent to which my hair stands on end at the costs and charges of these boys,” saving a salary and having his son gainfully employed was attractive. “Why was I ever a father! Why was my father ever a father!” In November 1868, Charley replaced Morley as a regular staff member. Dickens assured Morley that “I value your cooperation so highly and respect you so much that I would not for any consideration be misunderstood by you. I earnestly hope that you will not write the less for All the Year Round or give it a wider berth in any way, because of my making this experiment.” Fortunately, after a year’s trial, he had reason to conclude that “Charley is a very good man of business, and evinces considerable aptitude in sub-editing work.” Disgusted by his own inability to create a new Christmas story, Dickens decided not to “reproduce the old string of old stories in the old inappropriate way, which every other publication imitates to death.”35 In October he abandoned the idea of a Christmas number for 1868.

  The previous month he had seen his youngest child for the last time, the son whom “of all his children he loved … best … truly his Benjamin.” In late September 1868, he took Plorn to Southampton for his departure to join Alfred in Australia. To Mamie, he was the “dearest and best loved of all [her] brothers.” His father could not forget “the many fascinations of the last little child” he would ever have and felt the parting painfully. Though there were to be letters between him and his Australian exiles, there were also to be extended silences. When Plorn’s debts came to light, he felt angry, betrayed. When Sydney’s debts (he had developed “an inveterate habit of drawing bills that will ruin him”) threatened to be laid at his door, he had more reason to fear that the ghost of his father lived in his sons. Charley’s bankruptcy did not help. His brother Frederick’s death in October added another skeleton to the closet of insolvency and failure. His daughters’ problems distressed him, while Charles Collins, “who will never be well on this earth,” created daily his own life portrait of death and abandonment. He did not feel well himself, despite the shipboard and summer suntan that had begun to fade by early autumn. To his surprise, the American catarrh returned, though not as strongly as before.36

  In the late summer, in preparation for his farewell tour from October 1868 to May 1869, Dickens created a new reading, based on one he had fashioned in 1863 but had decided against using, a version of Bill Sikes’s murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist. He wanted something fresh and extraordinary, partly an expression of the showman’s search for novelty, partly of his need to find a new challenge. Practicing outdoors at Gad’s Hill, he frightened those who overheard him rehearsing his most demanding, most exhausting, performance. Though worried that it might prove too upsetting, even revolting, to his audiences, he loved the experience of being absorbed in it, of acting it out, of being both murdered and murderer. Finding it difficult to distinguish between himself and his text, after each rehearsal, as he walked the streets, he had the “vague sensation of being ‘wanted.’” When he began the tour, he had not yet decided whether to include it. The old formula worked well enough. The enthusiastic crowds at the inaugural reading at St. James’s Hall, and in Manchester and Liverpool later in the month, “were beyond all former experience.” A thousand people were turned away. In London, the demand was so great that “it seems as though we could fill St. Pauls.” But the same problems he had experienced while reading in America surfaced quickly, weariness, hoarseness, sleeplessness, and frenetic, pulse-racing exhaustion after each performance.

  In mid-November, he read the “Murder of Nancy” as an experiment to an audience of over one hundred invited guests. The opinion of his friends confirmed his desires. “The verdict
of ninety of them was: ‘It must be done.’ So it is going to be done.” There were warnings in the form of compliments and compliments in the form of warnings. A doctor said, “My dear Dickens, you may rely upon it that if only one woman cries out when you murder the girl, there will be a contagion of hysteria all over this place.” A well-known actress replied, “Why, of course, do it.… Having got such an effect as that, it must be done.… The public have been looking for a sensation these fifty years or so, and by Heaven they have got it.”37

  Through the late fall and winter of 1868–69 in England, Scotland, and Ireland, he went on “murdering Nancy” with a regularity that became addictive. Worried, Dolby began to advise him to read it less often. The constant railway journeys made Dickens’ nerves tremble, his lips turn white. He looked additionally haggard, the illusion of health with which he had returned from America long gone. He clung, though, to the new reading stubbornly, passionately. In mid-February 1869, his foot, the left one this time, to his surprise, “turned lame again,” forcing him to cancel a reading. He had known “for some days that the inflammation was coming on; but it is impossible to guard against it when that amount of standing in a hot place has to be encountered for months together.” A well-known Edinburgh doctor disparaged Dr. Henry Thompson’s previous diagnosis, laughing away contemptuously the suspicion that it was gout and attributing it instead to fatigue and walking in the snow. The enforced withdrawal was even more painful than his swollen foot, and he felt “as restless as if [he] were behind bars in the Zoological Gardens.” If “I could afford it, [I] would wear a part of my mane away as the Lion has done by rubbing it against the windows of my cage.”